Posts tagged ‘National Development and Reform Commission’

Cisco (CSCO.O) plans to invest more than $10 billion in China along with local business partners over the next several years, the U.S. network equipment maker said on Wednesday, as it seeks to shore up its position against strong domestic rivals.

Cisco, the world’s biggest maker of switching equipment and routers that run the Internet, announced the investment plans following high-level meetings between top executives and Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang and other government agency leaders.

A statement issued by the Silicon Valley company provided the broad outlines of how it planned to invest but did not detail any specific spending or timelines for doing so.

This will be used to fund innovation, equity investment, research and development and job creation, Cisco said.

It also signed an MoU with the Association of Universities (Colleges) of Applied Science (AUAS) to advance technical training of information and communications engineers.

The company said it will invest in a four-year network engineer training program with 100 universities and colleges of applied science recommended by AUAS.

Cisco is looking to capitalize on initiatives promoted by the Chinese government including “China Manufacturing 2025″, “Internet+” and its strategy to deliver more services as cloud-based Internet services.

The move comes as pressure has grown on foreign technology firms in the world’s biggest Internet market as Beijing has moved to promote domestic technology suppliers it says are needed to protect state secrets and data.

Earlier this year, a Reuters analysis found Cisco was among U.S. technology firms which had been dropped from state procurement lists in recent years.

Cisco and arch-rival Huawei Technologies [HWT.UL] of China have been battling each other for a decade. Political controversies over ties to their respective governments have raised questions about their futures on each other’s lucrative home turf.

In 2013, John Chambers, Cisco’s long-serving chairman and chief executive, acknowledged that security controversies had stymied the company’s moves to expand in China.

Chambers took part in the recent meetings with Chinese government officials along with CEO-Designate Chuck Robbins, who is scheduled to take over as chief executive in July. Chambers will remain as executive chairman of the company.

China unveiled an ambitious plan to enhance the competitiveness of its manufacturing sector by encouraging innovation and raising efficiency in an effort to boost economic growth. As the WSJ reports:

The blueprint, titled “Made in China 2025,” comes as China’s factories are struggling with sluggish demand, increasing competition from other developing economies and a slowing domestic economy.

The manufacturing sector is facing new challenges: bigger constraints from the environment and resources, rising labor costs and a notable slowdown in investment and exports, the State Council, or cabinet, said on the main government website Tuesday.

“The key to creating a new driver of economic growth…lies in the manufacturing sector,” it said.

China is the world’s biggest nuclear growth market. The country operates 24 reactors currently. A further 25 are under construction, out of 68 globally, according to the IAEA. China doesn’t disclose total spending, but based on the cost of reactors, its buildout represents tens of billions of dollars in potential new business for Chinese and foreign companies over the coming decade.

The former deputy head of China’s top planning agency was jailed for life on Wednesday over a bribery scandal that exposed graft at the highest levels of China’s government, and ensnared several companies including Toyota Motor Corp.

Liu was the first ministerial-level official to face an investigation after Xi Jinping became Communist Party head in late 2012 and launched the most aggressive anti-graft campaign China has seen in decades.

China has pledged to reduce its carbon emission intensity, namely emissions per unit of GDP, by 40 percent to 45 percent by 2020 from the 2005 level. It will also aim to bring the proportion of non-fossil fuels to about 15 percent of its total primary energy consumption.

Other targets include increasing forest coverage by 40 million hectares within the next five years.

The government will speed up efforts to establish a carbon emission permit market, under the plan, which also calls for deepened international cooperation under the principles of “common but differentiated responsibilities,” equity and respective capability.

The State Council said local governments and departments at all levels should recognize the significance and urgency in dealing with climate change and give higher priority to action on this issue.

China’s release of the action plan came just before a climate summit to be held at UN Headquarters in New York on Tuesday. Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli will attend.

Xie Zhenhua, deputy chief of the NDRC and the country’s top official on climate change, told a press conference that the plan was concrete action by China to participate in the global process to tackle climate change.

By the end of last year, China had reduced carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by 28.56 percent from 2005, which was equivalent to saving the world 2.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, Xie said.

At the end of 2013, China’s consumption ratio of non-fossil energy to primary energy stood at 9.8 percent. Forest growing stock had increased by 1.3 trillion cubic meters from 2005 to two trillion cubic meters, seven years ahead of schedule, according to the official.

In the first nine months of 2014, China’s energy consumption per unit of GDP dropped by 4.2 percent year on year and carbon intensity was cut by about 5 percent, both representing the largest drops in years, he said.

As a developing country, China is the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter. With the plan, the country has showed its confidence in achieving its green goals.

China is to “declare war” on pollution, Premier Li Keqiang said on Wednesday at the opening of the annual meeting of parliament, with the government unveiling detailed measures to tackle what has become a hot-button social issue.

It is not uncommon for air pollution in parts of China to breach levels considered by some experts to be hazardous. That has drawn much public ire and is a worry for the government, which fears any discontent that might compromise stability.

“We will resolutely declare war against pollution as we declared war against poverty,” Li told the almost 3,000 delegates to the country’s largely rubber-stamp legislature in a wide-ranging address carried live on state television.

Curbing pollution has become a key part of efforts to upgrade the economy, shift the focus away from heavy industry and tackle the perennial problem of overcapacity, with Li describing smog as “nature’s red-light warning against inefficient and blind development”.

“This is an acknowledgement at the highest level that there is a crisis,” said Craig Hart, expert on Chinese environmental policy and associate professor at China’s Renmin University.

“Their approach is going to have to be pro-economy. I think they will pump money into upgrading plants. This could be another green stimulus although it is not being packaged that way.”

China has published a series of policies and plans aimed at addressing environmental problems but it has long struggled to bring big polluting industries and growth-obsessed local governments to heel.

Li said efforts would focus first on reducing hazardous particulate matter known as PM 2.5 and PM 10 and would also be aimed at eliminating outdated energy producers and industrial plants, the source of much air pollution.

China will cut outdated steel production capacity by a total of 27 million tonnes this year, slash cement production by 42 million tonnes, and also shut down 50,000 small coal-fired furnaces across the country, Li said.

The 27 million tonnes of steel, equivalent to Italy’s production capacity, amounts to less than 2.5 percent of China’s total, and industry officials have warned that plants with another 30 million tonnes of annual output went into construction last year.

The targeted cement closures amount to less than 2 percent of last year’s total production.

The battle against pollution will also be waged via reforms in energy pricing to boost non-fossil fuel power. Li promised change in “the way energy is consumed and produced” through the development of nuclear and renewables, the deployment of smart power transmission grids, and the promotion of green and low-carbon technology.

Since 2010, 39.9 billion yuan from the central budget has been used in schoolhouse renovation and 21.9 billion yuan in educational equipment, said Liu Limin, deputy minister of education, at a press conference on Thursday.

Money was also used to build cafeterias at schools in 699 “poor” counties, after media reports exposed that some students in remote villages have to cook for themselves during study time, according to Liu.

The deputy minister revealed that the ministries of education and finance and the National Development and Reform Commission jointly worked out a plan on improving the level of education in poor areas at the end of last year.

The plan aims at completing six major tasks in three to five years, including improving basic school facilities like teaching equipment, sports grounds and toilets, promoting digital teaching methods and improving the quality of teaching staff, according to Liu.

He also said that the ministry will try to ensure better compulsory education and care for 23 million rural left-behind children at school age, who stayed alone or with their relatives while their parents go to cities to make a living.

Thermal power accounted for the bulk of the capacity growth, topping 36.5 million kw, followed by 29.93 million kw from hydropower, 14.06 million kw from on-grid wind power, 11.3 million kw from on-grid solar power and 2.21 million kw from nuclear power.

The country’s total installed power capacity topped 1.25 billion kw at the end of 2013, up 9.3 percent year on year.

Thermal power accounted for the bulk of the total capacity at the end of 2013, reaching more than 860 million kw, up 5.7 percent year on year.

On-grid solar energy capacity increased by 340 percent from a year earlier.

China’s electricity consumption, a key indicator of economic activity, rose 7.5 percent year on year to 5.32 trillion kilowatt hours in 2013, according to the NEA.

The growth rate exceeded the 5.5-percent rise registered in 2012, but was lower than the 11.7-percent rise registered in 2011.

The second phase will involve protecting the environment, improving people\’s livelihoods and achieving coordinated economic, social and cultural development, said Li Xiaonan, a Qinghai official for the Sanjiangyuan project.

With an average altitude of 4,000 meters, the Sanjiangyuan region has long been a paradise for herders, rare wild animals such as the Tibetan antelope and medicinal herbs like the Tibetan snow lotus.

THE furniture market in Foshan claims to be the biggest in the world. It boasts a bewildering mix of things to sit on, sleep in and eat at. One shop, named the “Louvre”, offers a range of styles from neoclassical to postmodern, which an assistant defines as a cross between European and modern, suitable for “successful people”.

The market, which sprawls over 3m square metres (32m square feet), showcases the manufacturing powers of Foshan, a city of 7m people in the southern province of Guangdong. The city is an archipelago of industrial clusters, dedicated to furniture, textiles, appliances, ceramics and the equipment required to make them. These clusters have produced some of China’s most successful private firms, such as Midea, a maker of household appliances, which began as a bottle-lid workshop, and now employs 135,000 people, generating over $16 billion in revenue in 2012.

Many economists worry that China will succumb to a “middle-income trap”, failing to make the jump from an early stage of growth, based on cheap labour and brute capital accumulation, to a more sophisticated stage, based on educated workers and improvements in productivity. But no economy, let alone one the size of China’s, moves in lockstep from one growth model to another. Some regions always outpace others. Provinces like Gansu, in China’s north-west, are still struggling to wean themselves off state-owned mines and smokestacks (see article). Other parts of China’s economy are already comfortably high-income, according to the World Bank’s definition. For example, Foshan’s GDP per head was almost $15,000 in 2012, higher than in some member states of the European Union.

Foshan best represents China’s “emerging economic frontier”, according to the Fung Global Institute (FGI), a think-tank in Hong Kong. With the help of researchers from the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s planning agency, the institute is studying Foshan for clues about the rest of the economy’s future.

Foshan’s example is relevant to other parts of China, it argues. Unlike the nearby metropolis of Shenzhen, it was never a special economic zone. Unlike neighbouring Guangzhou, it is not a provincial capital. It also shares many of the country’s growing pains. Lacking oil and coal, it is prone to electricity shortages. It is heavily polluted and highly indebted: its government pays 47% of its tax revenues on servicing its liabilities. Wages are going up, land is running out, and growth is slowing down. To tackle such problems, China’s Communist Party endorsed a long list of bold reforms at its long-awaited “third plenum” in November. Economists welcomed the list even as they worried that officials would fail to implement it. But in China, implementation is often a process of gradual diffusion not abrupt transition. Some of the principles proposed by the plenum are already in practice in Foshan. Some may have been inspired by it.

The third plenum resolved that the market should play a “decisive” role in the allocation of resources. In Foshan it already does. In the early 1990s Shunde, one of the city’s districts, pioneered the sale of government-backed enterprises to their managers, workers and outside investors. Foshan now has about one private enterprise for every 20 residents. In 2012 they grew twice as fast as the remaining state-owned firms.

November’s party plenum also called for private capital to play a bigger role in public infrastructure. In Foshan over the past nine years the government has allowed private firms to bid for over 500 projects, including power generation, water plants, and rubbish-incineration plants, according to Liu Yuelun, the city’s mayor. Ahead of the party’s call to consolidate the state bureaucracy, Shunde district had already slashed the number of its departments from 41 to 16.

Another national aim is to unify parts of China’s land market, allowing rural land to be leased on similar terms to state-owned urban plots. In the 1980s Foshan had already created a shadow market in communal land, which villagers leased to budding industrialists, contrary to national law that reserved such land for rural purposes. Because these land rights were technically illegal, many big firms eschewed them. But that made them all the cheaper for scrappy, small firms willing to live in the legal shadows. This grey market allowed Foshan’s industrial clusters to grow organically, according to economic logic rather than arbitrary land laws, argues the FGI. It also allowed villagers to reap some of the gains of Foshan’s industrial transformation. By 2010, the FGI calculates, the average Foshan resident owned property worth almost $50,000.